A user's reputation is shown with the colored squares under their info on the right. It's been around since the last upgrade.

You give a person reputation by rating their post. The balance symbol in the upper right of the post opens a window where you click approve or disapprove. Then type a comment. It's good form to leave your name, but you're not required to.

Over time as people get reputation assigned to them, they get more/fewer colored dots. If you're awful, you can go negative in reputation, at least at most boards.

People with more reputation have more impact when they give you reputation. I suspect that is what the Rep Power means. But it might also be related to age of your account and/or number of posts?

Reputation helps you guage the value of a person's comments to some degree. High reputaion people are usually friendly, helpful and give content rich answers that are accurate.

You can see reputation comments in your User CP.

There are titles associated with reputation. Hover your mouse over a person's colored squares and a small box appears. Most will say XX is on a distinguished road at this point. You get 10 rep points just for having your account.

You have to spread reputation around to other people before you can give it to the same person again.

Reputation can be a useful thing or it can turn into a social calamity of people rewarding friends, dinging enemies or even a group of people giving each other reputation to artificially inflate their scores--seen it at other sites. DON'T DO IT!!!.

MHPO would be not really. It's not very objective and could be abused quite easily in the wrong hands. :smiles: Being as diverse and vast a group as we are....it's almost impossible to have a user rating system that would be useful. On the other hand, One that rewards forum loyalty and doesn't rubber stamp the person based on the size of their following or how many friends they have. maybe a sort of system that just rewards years of membership and post count. up to a certain number each year would eliminate or limit the ability to rise through the ranks for those that are "Post mongers". I'm for a system that has you earn all of the positions that are available in a typical Food service program (i.e. GU, Bus person, Server, prep cook, etc, etc, etc......) In my opinion that would be more useful and appropriate. :beer: